It is the only solution that can put any pressure on the US in a macro sense. The DMCA is a uniquely American creation, and it will remain in tact until the US starts losing intellectual capital to other countries. Such a thing is not likely to happen any time soon, but in a decade or two, the US will still be arguing which Larry owns the copyright to a header file, while China and others would have moved on to far more interesting challenges.
This means that they were effectively sentenced to lifelong debt slavery. This is another dark part of the Scandinavian model that most aren’t aware of. Same system in Norway.
Are the authorities just not following up on using the legal framework to seize any of their earnings towards the debt?
Let's not equate these sites. scihub gives people what they are likely already paid for. Academic publishing business is a fraud. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo (recent video on the topic that I liked)
No, as long as the researcher was not bound by the grant to publish in the open and published in a journal/conference with a copyright, you do not have the legal right to get it, even if taxpayers funded the research.
It’s fucked that the law doesn’t stipulate open publications for taxpayer funded research, but that’s an issue with the law. Academic publishing isn’t a “fraud” in the normal definition.
Then we just have to normalize the use of Tor so that banning it becomes unthinkable ...
That pirate bay and scihub are still around, that their authors are walking around freely, is a miracle that should not be taken for granted.
We need to work on fixing these problems in our own countries. We need to talk about the freedoms we care about, put a good brand to those freedoms and win popular attention and enshrine those freedoms into law. And build a society that depends on those freedoms so much that rolling them back would be unthinkable.
That would be an actual long term solution. It is hard but if we all contribute, we can do it. Probably.